Former Louisiana governor (also former HHS secretary) Bobby Jindal and Charlie Katebi wrote an editorial in the Washington Examiner explaining how to rein-in high drug costs. To start with they don’t like the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). President Biden championed the IRA as a way for Medicare to lower drug costs for a small, insignificant number of hyper expensive drugs. For the uninitiated, the IRA allows Medicare to identify 10 high-cost drugs and negotiate the cost down, using punitive excise taxes if drug companies refuse. Jindal and Katebi have a point. The IRAs price negotiation formula is a Rube Goldberg-type of policy mechanism that only Democrats’ legislative writers would think up.
Category: Cost of Healthcare
Friday Links
- From the Committee to Unleash Prosperity: “Why is the U.S. government spending $1.7 billion purchasing 20 million covid vaccine doses for kids?” and “Gavin Newsom Admits He Was Wrong, Wrong, Wrong on COVID Lockdowns.”
- A scholarly argument for e-cigs.
- CTUP Question: How can Washington spend $1.2 trillion ($9,000 per American household) on anti-poverty programs and yet still have nearly 40 million people in poverty?
- Opioid update: The 300 counties that received the most doses of prescription pain pills from 2006 to 2013 later had the highest death rate from illicit opioids.
- Peter Coy reviews the Cato book, “Superabundance.”
- US per capita income growth rate for the past 150 years: remarkably steady at 2%.
- Nearly half of adults under 30 do not have a primary care doctor.
Bidenomics
Real incomes at every decile were lower and income inequality was greater than in 2019. Americans in the bottom 10% of earners were 6.3% poorer last year than in 2019 while those in the top 5% saw their incomes decline 4.1%.
Thursday Links
- CIA whistle blower: the agency bribed analysts to cover up the covid lab leak.
- Do you know the difference between “bagging” vs “buy and bill”? You may be spending too much for prescription drugs if you don’t.
- Panel: Sudafed doesn’t work. I happen to know it does.
- Opioid penetration map – county by county data. (WP)
- Why did the Surgeon General’s report on loneliness ignore the pen pal remedy?
- A new Human Rights Watch report: “Children in the US can be legally married in 41 states, physically punished by school administrators in 47 states, sentenced to life without parole in 22 states, and work in hazardous agriculture conditions in all 50 states.”
- Generic drugs save consumers $338 billion every year.